<p>hi everyone, i just got my grades for my first semester at school and am wondering how i would have done at other schools. is it harder to get a good gpa at "elite" schools? for example, would a 3.0 gpa at mit or harvard be equivalent to a 4.0 at penn state, maryland, or delaware and could a student who gets a 4.0 at penn state, maryland, or delaware do so at mit or harvard? im not sure what to think because top schools get higher quality students, so in that respect it would seem like it is harder to do well at top schools because most classes are curved. however, i have also heard that there is major grade inflation at some "elite" schools. obviously it is hard to know because most people only attend one school, but i would appreciate feedback from anyone who is well-informed on the matter.</p>
<p>Depends on your major, obviously.</p>
<p>The material is not necessarily harder, but for classes graded on a curve, it depends on how you scale against the other students. In “better” schools, your peers may be “smarter” or more academically oriented, so how you stack up against them depends on their performance.</p>
<p>Yes the courses are harder, but that doesn’t mean your grades would necessarily be lower. There are a lot of other variables in the mix.</p>
<p>I think the difficulty and quality (the two are not synonymous) of the courses - even those not graded on a curve - depend on the quality of the students. You’ll have good and bad professors EVERYWHERE. You’ll have tough majors and easy majors everywhere; you’ll have tough classes and joke classes almost everywhere (well, probably at every respectable flagship, not so much at EVERY college). In that sense, I would say it would be tough to differentiate between Schreyer’s and the University of Pennsylvania or the Maryland honors college and Hopkins. But English 101 at Penn State and English 101 at Yale are likely to be very different.</p>
<p>well the CUNY classes I took seemed like a joke compared to the ones I’ve taken in my college (which isn’t a top school, but still a decent private college). It might be because I took them over the summer though. It wasn’t that the CUNY professors wasn’t as good - they were very knowledgable and competent - it’s that the worth ethic of the students was so different and expectations seemed to be lower. Plus in schools like MIT and Caltech you’re “competing” against smarter students on average.
Totally depends on the major, too. Engineering, Architecture, Nursing, and other programs are often much harder and well-ranked at a State U than an ivy league school. </p>
<p>My brother is studying Econ at princeton and the major there seems to be much harder and more quantitative than the Econ major here. I don’t think pton has grade inflation, but many top schools do.</p>
<p>Classes are not harder at the elite universities.</p>
<p>Not at all.</p>
<p>It all depends on the professor, obviously, and many of them get shuffled in and out of the state schools, ivies, whatever the hell comes along.</p>
<p>If anything, it’s easier to get an A at the ivies and elite institutions that a state school because everyone there thinks they are entitled to one and there is massive grade inflation.</p>
<p>Princeton has implemented a policy to address this problem but it is far from “inflation free” as one poster suggested. At the height of its grade inflation, Princeton gave out 47.9% A’s (A+, A, A-). Now, after their new policy, the proportion of A’s given out is 39.7%.</p>
<p>“Princeton has implemented a policy to address this problem but it is far from “inflation free” as one poster suggested. At the height of its grade inflation, Princeton gave out 47.9% A’s (A+, A, A-). Now, after their new policy, the proportion of A’s given out is 39.7%.”</p>
<p>I think that’s kind of a lot; in most of my classes, the curve is done so 20% or so will get an A/A- and I think that’s pretty fair. But so much depends on the major and professor. In humanities classes here, grades are more lenient - if everyone writes a good paper, the whole class might end up with A’s and B’s. In the chem class I just took, half the class had a C+ or lower. </p>
<p>In the CUNY hunter classes I took, it’s not that everyone had an A/A- (I would guess maybe a third of the class, if even). It’s just that getting the A there was much easier than getting an A in my other classes. The grade distribution in my private college and the public college I attended was the same. </p>
<p>It’s hard to objectively measure “difficulty” because you have to consider difficulty of material as well as grade distribution. Then take the individual professor, major, college, and student body into account, and it becomes even harder to measure. And it’s true, students at top schools often think they’re entitled to good grades based on work ethic (or being smart).</p>
<p>Tech schools are harder, engineering is harder, US News ranking means squat.</p>
<p>4.0 from Georgia Tech (top 40) means a lot more than 4.0 from Brown (top 20).</p>
<p>take a class at a community college or tier 4 school, and then take a class at a top 50 school.</p>
<p>I guarantee you there will be a huge difference.</p>
<p>one of my community college classes, an econ class, was taught by a guy who taught the exact same class at a tier 1 university, ranked about 100.</p>
<p>ridiculously easy class.</p>
<p>At Princeton, 97% of the student body were in the top decile of their high school classes. Most Princeton students were straight A students in high school. Who says they don’t deserve A’s in half of their college classes?</p>
<p>At Oklahoma University, on the other hand, 36% of the student body were in the top decile of their high school classes. Here are the B students from high school. Even if 20% of their college grades are A’s, who’s to say they aren’t the ones actually enjoying grade inflation?</p>
<p>That is such a myth.
It only depends on the school, not its rank in terms of difficulty.</p>
<p>I’ve even heard people say that Harvard is the hardest to get in but the easiest to graduate.
But the top UC’s graduation rate and GPAs are really bad.</p>
<p>Likewise, Brown or Stanford is really hard to get into, but they give generous grades</p>
<p>So, it only depends on the school and the professors</p>
<p>Having taken a number of classes at four different universities, I can confidently say the “difficulty” of classes (amount of material covered, amount of work assigned and quality of work expected) does vary quite a bit between institutions. With few exceptions, I have learned a lot more in my classes at the University at Pennsylvania and Haverford than in my Bryn Mawr classes. I have also TAed for a few Bryn Mawr classes that I had previously taken at Haverford or Penn. Comparing classes side-by-side, I was surprised just how huge the difference was!</p>
<p>Of course the content of classes does not necessarily correlate with the grade you would earn in the course, as posters above have pointed out.</p>
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<p>And who in fact is in a position to relay this information to you? Oh, right, only those who got in.</p>
<p>I have taken classes from the University of Connecticut (respectable but not “elite” state flagship), and Caltech. Classes at Caltech, at least in math and science (I didn’t take any humanities at UConn, so I can’t compare those) are much harder. At UConn I felt that most of what I did was simple applications of given formulae, whereas at Caltech we’re expected to derive a lot of the formulae, and do more complex non-obvious manipulations. I did take one class at UConn which broke that pattern, though I would say it was still easier grade-wise, because the student body is weaker at UConn, but the professor still wants to give some A’s.</p>
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<p>High school is easy. Caltech and MIT, despite being lower ranked than Princeton, don’t dish out A’s like candy just because the kids are used to that from high school.</p>
<p>Please.</p>
<p>Of course it’s harder at top schools. I have friends in the same major at lesser-ranked schools, and our stuff was much more fast-paced and thorough. The material is taught differently, the competition is more fierce, and the tests are arguably more difficult.</p>
<p>I absolutely guarantee you that if you took a 3.5 Ivy student and stuck him/her in a state school, for instance, that 3.5 would be a 4.0 easy.</p>
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<p>Then Caltech and MIT are harder than Princeton, which does not at all contradict my claim that Princeton is probably more difficult than OU.</p>
<p>Yeah, complaints about grade inflation in the Ivies are stupid. Yes, there are stupid and unfair things like Brown’s grading system. But generally, the kids in Ivies are in the top 1-3% of intelligence. So they should do well in their classes.</p>